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Into the Future With Sky Candy

Charlie Martin | 2:25 PM on August 21, 2026
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

So, as promised, I'm adding a Sunday Supplement to my regular Sky Candy. As with Sky Candy, I'm just making it up as I go, so feel free to leave me suggestions in the comments. More on that at the end of the column, but expect Sunday Supplement to have its own soundtracks and a mix of eye candy and science articles. Also, if you haven't already, have a look at my piece from last Thursday, "Elon Musk Fails to Blow Up Moon! A Sky Candy Special," in which I prove I'm not above sucking up for more readership.

And now, on with the Sky Candy.

I listen to a lot of this when I'm writing. Maybe you'll like it, too.

This is making me hungry.

It would hardly be a Sky Candy without an Andrew McCarthy post.

Aleix Roig hits pretty often, too.

Here are a couple from NASA. We hit the Trifid Nebula fairly often, but this shot shows things I've never seen before.

This was a reaction to the Trifid Nebula above. It's obviously synthetic, but it was cool and I couldn't resist. Grok tells me DJP TECHNO has minimal engagement, might be worth a follow. (Sorry about the duplication, but X is not being cooperative.)

We normally think of nebulae as being bright and colorful, but there are also opaque ones.

The Andromeda Galaxy was once known as the Andromeda Nebula (still is sometimes). Besides being kind of a babe [see Judi Bowker in Clash of the Titans], Andromeda was the subject of controversy when Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis debated in 1920. Shapley believed that the Milky Way was the whole universe; Curtis argued that Andromeda was a whole separate galaxy, much farther away than the stars in the Milky Way.

The debate didn't settle the question, but Edwin Hubble — the one they named the telescope after — settled it a few years later, when he showed that Andromeda was millions of light years away and must be separate. 

The "three body problem" is a famous problem in dynamics: How can the orbits of three (or more) bodies be computed? Henri Poincaré approached the problem and discovered that for the general case, there was no efficient closed form. This was one of the first results of what has become known as chaos theory. You can read Grok's summary here.  There are a few special cases, however. Leonhard Euler proved that small objects can have stable orbits in line with two more massive objects in 1767, and Joseph-Louis Lagrange extended that to a total of five points: Euler's three called L1, L2, L3 and two more, L4 and L5. (Yeah Euler got a little screwed that they aren't E1, E2, and E3, but Euler has lots of other stuff named for him, so don't feel bad for him.)

Later, astronomers discovered asteroids clustered in Jupiter's L4 and L5 positions — 60° ahead and behind Jupiter but in the same orbit. The first ones discovered were named for heroes in the Trojan war in the Iliad, so they became known as the Trojan asteroids, and L4 and L5 as the "Trojan points."

Which all leads up to these images.

This was a taxing video to capture.

Let's close out a little closer to home.

Europa plays a bit part in a lot of SF. It turns out to have even more water than we thought. Attempt no landing there.

A little closer.

And playing Gilligan to Mars' Skipper.

Noted in passing.

Also for Sky Candy fans: Total Eclipse of the Sky Candy

And finally from near Earth, the Eye of Sauron the Sahara. It's so perfectly circular that it was thought for a long time to be an impact crater like the Barringer Crater, but now it's thought to be a boring old volcanic structure that has been badly eroded.

And that's it for today. Come back to the Sunday Supplement for volcanoes, space guns, and arctic ice. And don't forget to come back next Friday for more Sky Candy!

Charlie Martin

Charlie Martin writes on science, health, culture, and technology for PJ Media. For media inquiries, please contact [email protected]

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COLUMNS

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SCIENCE SPACE

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